At present, children are taught to read aloud in grades 1-3, and are expected to read silently by grade 4. Children who fail to read independently by grade 4 tend to fall further and further behind their classmates as they grow older, and are at substantial risk of growing up illiterate. Literacy is a key to educational achievement in general. Unfortunately, as many as 75% of American fourth grade students read below expected levels.
Oral reading is taught by a combination of classroom instruction and individual practice. Reading aloud helps children learn to identify printed words by relating them to the spoken form they have already learned. At this stage, children's comprehension of spoken language is typically above their independent reading level.
Listening to children's oral reading is important for several reasons. First, it can identify word identification errors so that they can be corrected. Correcting word reading errors enhances word recognition accuracy and comprehension for students with learning disabilities. Moreover, studies of spoken assistance on demand have revealed a serious flaw in assuming that young readers are willing and able to ask for help when they need it. Children with reading difficulties often fail to realize when they misidentify a word. Second, listening can detect disfluency--slow, halting reading likely to be associated with growing frustration and/or failing comprehension. Third, the very act of listening can have a powerful motivational effect, by giving young readers a supportive audience for their attempts at oral reading. Fourth, listening can be used to detect success, not just mistakes. That information can help both in identifying what the child knows, and in providing positive reinforcement when the child succeeds.
Recently, research has been undertaken with the goal of using speech recognition to provide assistance to children learning to read. Advances in technology have made the application of speech recognition to oral reading increasingly more feasible. Jack Mostow, et al., "A prototype reading coach that listens", In Proceedings of the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, (AAAI-94), Seattle, Wash., 1994; Martin Russell, et al., "Applications of automatic speech recognition in young children", In Proceedings of the fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing", Philadelphia, Pa., 1996.
When developing computer-assisted reading programs, one critical problem is acquiring narrated materials for use with the software. There are two possibilities for acquiring narrated materials, voice talent and synthesized speech. Voice talent is expensive and limits the material available for use with the reading tutor. Synthesized speech, while significantly advanced in recent years, is not as natural or as motivating as a good narrator. Another problem in developing computer-assisted reading programs is that currently available systems have the content "hard coded" with the various rules for operating the system. As a result, new content can be captured only through the substantial expense of money and effort in developing a new "hard coded" product. Thus, the need exists for a reading tutor which is capable of rapidly and easily capturing fluent speech, determining if the speech is accurate, and storing it for future use.